"Rationally" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... creditable to the intelligence of their builders, and can be made to reveal the manner of their use and the actual progress they had made in the arts of life; but they never can be rationally explained while such wild views are entertained concerning them. Until the actual character and signification of these ruins are made known, such opinions may be expected to prevail concerning them. They spring from ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... we must go to the regions of Europe that are least industrially and intellectually "advanced." Yet amongst the most sceptical and "enlightened" of moderns there is generally a large residuum of tradition. "Emotionally," it has been said, "we are hundreds of thousands of years old; rationally we are embryos"{1}; and many people who deem themselves "emancipated" are willing for once in the year to plunge into the stream of tradition, merge themselves in inherited social custom, and give way to sentiments and impressions which in their more ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... Romans and Samnites stood opposed in Apulia, they had sent envoys thither to enjoin both parties to lay down their arms (434). This diplomatic intervention in the decisive struggle of the Italians could not rationally have any other meaning than that of an announcement that Tarentum had at length resolved to abandon the neutrality which it had hitherto maintained. It had in fact sufficient reason to do so. It was no doubt a difficult and dangerous thing for Tarentum to be entangled in such a war; for ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... felt hat at the back of his head, his rather heavy, rather mottled face, his rationally thick boots and slouching tweed-clad form, a little round-shouldered and very obstinate looking, he strolls through all my speculations sucking his teeth audibly, and occasionally throwing out a shrewd aphorism, the intractable unavoidable ore of ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... up to complete unconsciousness was met with, but in some instances where the pulse, respiration, and general bodily condition pointed to speedy dissolution, the patients answered rationally often between moans or cries ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... evidence of the wise use Rashi made of the Peshat. The word polemics, perhaps, is not exact. Rashi does not make assaults upon Christianity; he contents himself with showing that a verse which the Church has adopted for its own ends, when rationally interpreted, has an entirely different meaning and application. Only to this extent can Rashi be said to have written polemics against the Christians. However that may be, no other course is possible; ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... exhibited before an American audience would simply disgust some, and make others morbidly attentive. This kind of literature, comic or tragic, disseminated as it everywhere is among impulsive and passionate Russian readers, has been anything but morally healthful. One might as rationally go about and poison wells. And the Russian youth are sophisticated to a degree that seems to us almost startling. In 1903, a newspaper in Russia sent out thousands of blanks to high school boys and girls all over the country, to discover what books constituted their favourite reading. ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... experience confirms that of every genuine teacher—from Dr. Arnold downward—that, of all employments of man or woman on this earth, the one that is capable of giving the most constant and intense happiness is teaching in a rationally conducted school. So fond was she of teaching, that when the severity of the Winter obliged her to suspend the school for many weeks, she opened a free school for poor children, one of her favorite classes in which was composed of ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... be rationally required of the student of philosophy is not a preliminary and absolute, but a gradual and progressive, abrogation of prejudices.—SIR W. ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... this book speak for itself; I trust it is honest, charitable, and rationally religious. If I have (and I show it through all my writings) a shrinking from priestcraft of every denomination, that feeling I take to be due to some ancient heredity ingrained, or, more truly, inburnt into my nature from ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... willful fault, and misses what it ought first to have attained. It is therefore, to a certain measure, vile in its perfection; while the older work is noble even in its failure, and classic no less in what it deliberately refuses, than in what it rationally ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... unto them, which by their own Industrie, they may not afterward attein anie where els, as well as there. Truly it never came into my thoughts, either directly or indirectly to make Universities useless; nor can it bee rationally infer'd from anie thing in the matter form or end of that discours of mine: but I will grant that such as can see no farther then what wee now ordinarily attein unto; and withal think that there is no Plus ...
— The Reformed Librarie-Keeper (1650) • John Dury
... Gogyrvan, though, were perplexing. These men who considered that all you possessed was loaned you to devote to the service of your God, your King and every woman who crossed your path, could hardly be behaving rationally. To talk of serving God sounded as sonorously and as inspiritingly as a drum: yes, and a drum had nothing but air in it. The priests said so-and-so: but did anybody believe the gallant Bishop of Merion, for example, was ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... of rheumatism, which occasionally occur, probably follow epidemics of influenza, tonsillitis, or other mild infections, and instances of two or more cases of rheumatism in one family or household are most rationally explained as due to the spread of the precedent infection from one member of the family to the other. Instances of the direct transmission of the disease from one patient to ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... due to me for perceiving this error, and none for avoiding it. Algebra is the only true arithmetic. The latter is founded on the former in almost all its rules, and one is just as easily learned as the other. If arithmetic is to be taught rationally it must be taught algebraically. With half the pains that a learner takes to make himself master of the rule of three and fractions, he would acquire as much algebra as would render every rule in arithmetic as easy ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... causes that will produce a miscarriage of this sort, where the richest soil, impregnated with the choicest seeds of learning and observation, shall entirely fail to present us with such a crop as might rationally have been anticipated. Many such men waste their lives in indolence and irresolution. They attempt many things, sketch out plans, which, if properly filled up, might illustrate the literature of a nation, ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... chance. Lawyers were to undertake no causes till they were sure they were just, a man might be precluded altogether from a trial of his claim, though, were it judicially examined it might be found a very just claim[58].' This was sound practical doctrine, and rationally repressed a too ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... that he had enquired at the door for Miss Beverley, and, having sent in his name, was shewn into the parlour, where Mrs Charlton, much pleased with his appearance, had suddenly conceived the little plan which she had executed, of contriving a surprise for Cecilia, from which she rationally expected the very consequences that ensued, though the immediate means she ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... concrete sense. He replied: "Then wherefore God?" So answered, in the secret tribunal of their consciousness, the man Kant and the man James. Only in their capacity as professors they were compelled to justify rationally an attitude in itself so little rational. Which does not mean, of course, that the ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... such extreme views that I despair of saving you. Will you not look at this subject rationally? It is not perjury, but policy; ...
— The Martyr of the Catacombs - A Tale of Ancient Rome • Anonymous
... celebrateth the most grave and ancient of things, Chaos, Night, and Dulness; so is it of the most grave and ancient kind. Homer (saith Aristotle) was the first who gave the form, and (saith Horace) who adapted the measure, to heroic poesy. But even before this, may be rationally presumed from what the ancients have left written, was a piece by Homer, composed of like nature and matter with this of our poet. For of epic sort it appeareth to have been, yet of matter surely not unpleasant, witness what is reported of it by the learned Archbishop ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... hereof does require Mr. Drake, and he is a Parliament man, therefore a man counted able to speak rationally, to plead this cause of digging with me.[115:1] And if he show a just and rational title that Lords of Manors have to the Commons, and that they have a just power from God to call it their right, shutting out others, then I will write as much ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... are the four massive objections: self-sacrifice is unreal psychologically, aesthetically, morally, or rationally: But negative considerations are not enough. No amount of demonstration of what a thing is not will ever reveal what it is. Objections are merely of value for clearing a field and marking the spots on which a structure cannot be reared. The serious task of erecting that ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... the questions contained in your last letter, I not only agree with your opinion, but go even further. I think that everything that is done by genius as genius, is done unconsciously. A person of genius can also act rationally, with reflection, from conviction, but this is all done, as it were, indirectly. No work of genius can be improved or be freed from its faults by reflection and its immediate results, but genius can, by means of reflection and action, be gradually raised to a degree ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... notwithstanding the kindnesses that He had showed them (Gen. 13:13), for the land of Sodom was now like the garden of Eden heretofore (Gen. 13:10). This, therefore, provoked Him the more to jealousy, and made their plague as hot as the fire of the Lord out of Heaven could make it. And it is most rationally to be concluded, that such, even such as these are, that shall sin in the sight, yea, and that too in despite of such examples that are set continually before them, to caution them to the contrary, must be partakers of ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... an instant forgotten what we were there for, and his attention recalled mine. I was surprised to see that when I made the effort I could talk and think quite as rationally as ever, though the wildest pranks were going on in my mind and vision. Kennedy did not beat about in putting his question, evidently counting on the ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... advantage" which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms. And how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally advantageous choice? What man wants is simply INDEPENDENT choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... spike-shaped protuberance directed from the earth, in order to explain the increased number of stars. If many such places could be found, then the probability is great that this explanation is wrong. We should more rationally suppose some real inequality of star distribution here. It is, in fact, in just such details that the method of HERSCHEL breaks down, and a careful examination of his system leads to the belief that it must be greatly ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... then asked him if he had in the year 1827 sailed from the port of Nantucket, on the brig 'Grampus,' under Captain Bernard, in company, among others, with a youth named A. Gordon Pym? And a moment later I wished that I had been less abrupt in my questioning. Peters did manage quite coolly and rationally to answer "Yes" to all my questions. But at the words "Pym," "Bernard," "Grampus," his eyes began, in appearance, to start from their sockets; those awful teeth gleamed from that cavernous mouth, as he uttered demoniac yell on yell, and raised himself to a sitting posture ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... as to admit of being worked by two horses and a single man, instead of three or four horses with a man and a boy, what a vast saving of labour and expense would at once be effected, at the same time that the crops would be prodigiously increased! And such an improvement may rationally be expected, from what has really been accomplished in particular districts. In short, if merely the best modes of cultivation, now in use in some parts of Great Britain, were generally extended, and ...
— The Grounds of an Opinion on the Policy of Restricting the Importation of Foreign Corn: intended as an appendix to "Observations on the corn laws" • Thomas Malthus
... retrogressive chain; their relation is like that of the seed and the sprout. Moreover, mutual dependence and the like, which are held to constitute defects in the case of real things, are unable to disestablish Nescience, the very nature of which consists in being that which cannot rationally be established, and which hence may be compared to somebody's swallowing a whole palace and the like (as seen in a dream or under the influence of a magical illusion). In reality the individual souls are non-different from Brahman, and hence essentially free from all impurity; but as they are ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... morning Phyllis showed traces of having spent a bad night. But she spoke rationally and not in the wild way in which she had spoken before retiring, and her father felt that there was no need for him to be uneasy in regard to her condition. He allowed her to go to the side of her friend, Ella, and as he was leaving them together ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... should I not burn myself on this Occasion: Zadig having forc'd her ingenuously to confess, that she parted with her Life more out of Regard to what the World would say of her, and out of Pride and Ostentation, than any real Love for the deceas'd, he talk'd to her for some considerable Time so rationally, and us'd so many prevailing Arguments with her to justify her due Regard for the Life which she was going to throw away, that she began to wave the Thought, and entertain a secret Affection for her friendly Monitor. Pray, Madam, tell me, said Zadig, how would you dispose of yourself, upon the ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire
... we know to be a false foundation. But there are some learned Germans whose orthodoxy would pass examination at Exeter Hail; and there are many subjects, such, for instance, as the present, on which all their able men are agreed in conclusions that cannot rationally give offence to any one. For the Book of Job, analytical criticism has only served to clear up the uncertainties which have hitherto always hung about it. It is now considered to be, beyond all doubt, a genuine Hebrew-original, completed by its writer ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... is, however, presently checked by the Fool, who tells him some home truths, and asks him, among other questions, whether Solomon did not say that it is not meet to despise a poor man, who conducts himself rationally. Then appears Howel Tightbelly, the miser, who in capital verse, with very considerable glee and exultation, gives an account of his manifold rascalities. Then comes his wife, Esther Steady, home from the market, between whom and her husband there is a pithy dialogue. Captain Riches and ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... consented, she said, she was between sleeping and waking; that is, she did not know whether she was awake or asleep, and the cunning Devil it seems was satisfied with her Assent given so, when she was asleep, or neither asleep or awake, so taking the Advantage of her Incapacity to act rationally. ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... these men were likely to ride out of their way to see him. And now that his mind worked rationally, he had no fear of Buck Olney's vengeful return. Buck Olney, he guessed shrewdly, was extremely busy just now, putting as many miles as possible between himself and that part of Idaho. Unless Billy Louise should come or send for him, he would in all probability lie alone there until he was able ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... that was not, as the Austrians alleged, a nursery for murderers but a patriotic body—it no doubt reminded the people of their brothers in Macedonia, the Voivodina and Bosnia, but at the same time urged them to cultivate the land more rationally, to visit the doctor rather than some old woman, to dress, sleep and eat in accordance with hygiene, and to take steps against illiteracy—in 1910 the efforts of the "Narodna Odbrana" had had such success ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... the gospel of Christ? The heart-rending prospect of endless wo, or the gloomy horrors of annihilation, could afford no consolation to that mind, which has the principles of glory deeply rooted in its nature and which nothing but the continuance of existence can rationally satisfy. As you value unbroken peace in the hour of dissolution, and as you value the happiness of these dear pledges heaven has lent you, study for the evidence of christian truth, search the scriptures, and labor to enter into that rest ...
— Twenty-Four Short Sermons On The Doctrine Of Universal Salvation • John Bovee Dods
... which reminds me, I do assure you, of our native atmosphere at Coolspring, Mass., is more than I can tell, with a hard steel pen on a leaf of flimsy paper. You have heard the saying, 'When a good American dies, he goes to Paris'. Maybe, sometimes, he's smart enough to discount his own death, and rationally enjoy the future time in the present. This you see is a poetic light. But, mercy be praised, the moral of my residence in Paris is plain:—If I can't go to Amelius, Amelius must come to me. Note the address Grand Hotel; ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... he would only know us—if he would only speak rationally—if he would only keep from these dreadful ramblings about spirits and drinking! It breaks my heart to hear him speak as he does. Oh! I could bear to lose him now, though we have just found him, if I could only feel that he was coming back, like the ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... joins readily with all acids, and must necessarily destroy any acidity it meets in the stomach; but that its purgative power is uncertain, for sometimes it has not the least effect of that kind. As it is a mere insipid earth, he rationally concludes it to be purgative only when converted into a sort of neutral salt by an acid in the stomach, and that its effect is therefore proportional to the quantity of ...
— Experiments upon magnesia alba, Quicklime, and some other Alcaline Substances • Joseph Black
... Until 1885, the rationally trained teacher of gymnastics was unknown in England, and the physical training of the girls in this country was monopolised by dancing mistresses and drill sergeants, most of whom were ignorant of the laws which govern ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is inferred also to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and the lord of light in his world, and the source of truth and reason in the other; this is the first great cause which he who would act rationally either in public or private ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... affected with giddiness, or delirium, followed by a discharge or vomiting of black bile, invariably died after lingering one, two, or three days, their bodies being covered with small black spots similar to grains of gun-powder; in this state, however, they possessed their intellects, and spoke rationally till their dissolution. ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... should regard it; it is not, I mean, a revival of a dead costume, but a realisation of living laws. I give it as an example of a particular application of principles which are universally right. This rationally dressed young man can turn his hat brim down if it rains, and his loose trousers and boots down if he is tired—that is, he can adapt his costume to circumstances; then he enjoys perfect freedom, the arms and legs are not made awkward or uncomfortable by the excessive ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... of the assembly of classes public opinion first acquires true thoughts and an insight into the condition and the notion of the State and its affairs, and thus develops the capacity of judging more rationally concerning them; it learns, furthermore, to know and respect the routine, talents, virtues, and skill of the authorities and officers of the State. While publicity stimulates these talents in their further ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... maddening as your supplications to me are vain and useless!" said Wagner, himself now laboring under a fearful excitement. "Rise, I implore you, rise, and let us endeavor to converse more calmly—more rationally." ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... of those who seek solitude upon the account of devotion, filling their hopes and courage with certainty of divine promises in the other life, is much more rationally founded. They propose to themselves God, an infinite object in goodness and power; the soul has there wherewithal, at full liberty, to satiate her desires: afflictions and sufferings turn to their advantage, being undergone for the acquisition ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... the French acted, and how rationally the Americans! But Franklin and Washington were great men. None have appeared yet in France; and Necker has only returned to make a wretched figure! He is become as insignificant as his King; his name is never mentioned, but now and then as disapproving ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... nature had made him perfect he would have had no wants; and it is only by supplying his wants that utility can be developed. The development of utility is therefore the object of our being, and the attainment of this great end the cause of our existence. This principle clears all doubts, and rationally accounts for a state of existence which ...
— English Satires • Various
... sitting speechless before the dinner he could not eat—his heated imagination wove visions of horror in which his wife was entangled as a fly in a spider's web. What if Connie were really possessed by the influence of some drug which rendered her incapable of willing rationally? What if he missed her at the entrance to the opera? Or what if—most desperate supposition—she should, in the event of his finding her, refuse to accept his manufactured excuse to recall her home? She was capable, he knew, of any recklessness, but he had never for an instant conceived her ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... created thing is endowed with energy, indeed, but this does nothing of itself but from Him who implanted it. Examine any other earthly object, like a silkworm, bee or other small creature. View it first naturally, then rationally, and at length spiritually, and if you can think deeply, you will be astounded at all you see. Let wisdom speak in you, and you will exclaim in astonishment, "Who does not see the divine in such things? They are all of divine wisdom." Still more will you exclaim, if you note the ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... Source several times for money, which she gave him. As he always wanted more, she ended by refusing, for she was both methodical and decided, and knew how to act rationally when it was necessary to do so. By dint of entreaties he obtained a large sum from her one night; but when he begged her for more a few days later, she showed herself inflexible, and did not give way to ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... from a girl. She said she didn't love Dick, and would as soon marry my chauffeur—or words to that effect. Explained everything—or, if she didn't explain, looked at me, and I thought she had explained. I forget now whether she did explain or not, rationally and satisfactorily, but it doesn't matter. There is no one like her, and I have reached a stage of idiocy concerning her which I would blush to describe. I see now that the feeling which a very young man, hardly out of boyhood, dignified with the name of love, is merely a kind ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... off his speech; and the three, locking the study-door, settled down to talk rationally, or, at any rate, as rationally as ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... be the Poet's meaning in mentioning his own villa, when he is endeavouring to awaken in Munatius a taste for the surrounding beauties of his more magnificent seat. Commentators rationally conclude that some connecting lines have been lost from the latin of this Ode. It appears to me, that the idea which those dismembered lines conveyed, must necessarily have been the comparison added in the four ensuing lines, which makes ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... point is that the organization of society depends ultimately upon knowledge of the end of existence. If we do not know its end, we shall be at the mercy of accident and caprice. Unless we know the end, the good, we shall have no criterion for rationally deciding what the possibilities are which should be promoted, nor how social arrangements are to be ordered. We shall have no conception of the proper limits and distribution of activities—what he called justice—as a trait ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... out that dreadful 'ickey wickey'? Of course he can't understand things now, really, but we never know when he'll begin to, and we aren't ever going to let him hear baby-talk at all, if we can help it. And truly, when you come to think of it, it is absurd to expect a child to talk sensibly and rationally on the mental diet of 'moo-moos' and 'choo-choos' served out to them. Our Professor of Metaphysics and Ideology in our Child Study Course says that nothing is so receptive and plastic as the Mind ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... crazy girl had been waked by the ravings of the Persian, and was anxiously enquiring if the dog—the dreadful dog—was there. But she soon allowed herself to be quieted by Paula, and she answered the questions put to her so rationally and gently, that her nurse called the physician who could confirm Paula in her hope that a favorable change had taker place in her mental condition. Her words were melancholy and mild; and when Paula remarked on ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... are not yet so well known as those of astronomy, physics, mechanics or biology, but they operate none the less surely. Until these principles are understood, and until men plan their activities in relation to them, there will be no possibility of a rationally organized and wisely managed society. The physicist who planned a pump on the supposition that water is always liquid in form would get no farther than the social scientist who advocated social changes on the theory that the only motive that animated ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing
... Freedom and on the Indeterminateness of the Future. In the hands of the Syndicalists these become in effect: "Never mind what you think, rouse up your feeling intensely; act as you feel and then see what you think." Briefly this amounts to saying: "Act on impulse, behave instinctively and not rationally." In too many cases, as we know, this is equivalent to a merely selfish "Down tools if you feel like it." Now so far from Bergson really giving any countenance to capricious behaviour, or mere impulse, ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... rationally zealous; he desired the prosperity, and maintained the honour of the clergy; of the dissenters he did not wish to infringe the toleration, but he opposed ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... though inherited instincts were controlling her, and would always control her whenever she was in his presence; as though she the descendant of serfs must infallibly submit to the descendant of lords—must forever fear the man who had been her master even when he was her lover. Rationally she hated him for the harm that he had done her, but instinctively she feared him for the further harm that he might yet ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... these works of the ancients might rationally have been denominated works of 'High Art;' and here we remark the difference between the hypothetical or rational, and the historical account of facts; for though here is reason enough why ancient art might have been denominated ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... fair medical, legal, or other watchful experience; that it is as well established and as common a state of mind as any with which observers are acquainted; and that it is one of the first elements, above all others, rationally to be suspected in, and strictly looked for, and separated from, any ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... Demonology. The pursuers of exact science to its coy retreats, were sure to be the first to discover that the most remarkable phenomena in Nature are regulated by certain fixed laws, and cannot rationally be referred to supernatural agency, the sufficing cause to which superstition attributes all that is beyond her own narrow power of explanation. Each advance in natural knowledge teaches us that it is the pleasure of the Creator ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... success that you can rationally expect—what have you done? You have added one work of art the more to a literature already so rich, that the life of a man can hardly exhaust it; so rich, that it is compelled to drop by the way, as booty ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... should have been paid for relatively pure calcium lime and limestone, being afraid to use goods whose content of magnesium was not small. It is poor policy to use either kind of burned lime in great excess, but when rationally used on all soils except sandy ones, there is no preference to be exercised that can be based upon performance. A magnesian lime corrects as much acidity as a high calcium lime, and a little more, and its use is to be recommended if there is any advantage in the ...
— Right Use of Lime in Soil Improvement • Alva Agee
... incoherent speech in defence of the German war, but very severe upon the unfrugal manner it was carried on, in which he addressed himself principally to the C[hancellor] of the E[xchequer], and laid on him terribly.... Legge answered Beckford very rationally and coolly. Lord K. spoke long. Sir F. D[ashwood] maintained the German war was most pernicious.... Lord B[arrington] at last got up and spoke half an hour with great plainness and temper, explained many hidden things relating ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... just had, he thought that it might be a very good sort of place. Buttar introduced him to several boys, who, he said, were very nice fellows; so that before many hours had passed Ernest found himself with a considerable number of acquaintances, and even Dawson and Bouldon condescended to speak rationally to him. ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... Miss Harvey. I have been rude—mad. If you will look in your glass when you go home, and have a woman's heart in you, you may at least see an excuse for me: but like Mr. Trebooze I am not. Forgive and forget, and let us walk home rationally." And he offered to ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... was some homicidal mania, much depression, and attempts at suicide. She could not be left alone in her room for a moment. But the day after the transplantation of the glands this young woman embraced her mother, and talked so rationally to her that she called in Dr. Brinkley, and with tears repeated what her daughter had just said. Dr. Brinkley advised her that the results were altogether too sudden to build upon. "There will certainly be ups and downs yet," he said. "You must expect good days and bad days, when you ...
— The Goat-gland Transplantation • Sydney B. Flower
... destruction of slavery; and much of what they did was positively harmful to the cause for which they were fighting. Those of their number who considered the Constitution as a league with death and hell, and who, therefore, advocated a dissolution of the Union, acted as rationally as would anti-polygamists nowadays if, to show their disapproval of Mormonism, they should advocate that Utah should be allowed to form a separate nation. The only hope of ultimately suppressing slavery lay in the preservation of the Union, and every Abolitionist ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... may be elements in the transcendent glory of the whole. And once fired by this thought, those who pretend to justify the ways of God to man have, naturally, not stopped to consider whether so edifying a phenomenon was not a hasty illusion. They have, indeed, detested any attempt to explain it rationally, as tending to obscure one of the moral laws of the universe. In venturing, therefore, to repeat such an attempt, we should not be too sanguine of success; for we have to encounter not only the intrinsic difficulties of the problem, but also ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... matter with you. And just now you're dead tired. You'll talk more rationally after you've had some tea. Rest your throat until it comes." They were sitting by a window. As Ottenburg looked at her in the gray light, he remembered what Mrs. Nathanmeyer had said about the Swedish face "breaking early." Thea was as gray ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... lessons had been a source of pleasure to both, and of great profit to Gertrude. In his capacity of teacher, Mr Sherwood never teased and bantered her as he had been apt to do at other times. Indeed, he had almost given up that now; and Gertrude thought it much more pleasant to be talked to rationally, or even to be overlooked altogether, than to be trilled with. Besides, though he put a cheerful face on the matter of leaving, he was ill, and sometimes despondent; and it seemed to her very sad indeed that he should go away among ...
— Christie Redfern's Troubles • Margaret Robertson
... particulars I will add a few general observations which will make what follows easier to understand. So long as its circumstances are normal, the insect's actions are calculated most rationally in view of the object to be attained. What could be more logical, for instance, than the devices employed by the Hunting Wasp when paralysing her prey (Cf. "Insect Life": chapters 3 to 12 and 15 to 17.—Translator's Note.) so that it may keep fresh for her larva, while in no wise imperilling that ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... certain part of the day, began to sit up at night. This led to a direct clash of wills. Mr. Fullerton said that the girl was doing her best to ruin her health for life; Mrs. Fullerton wished to know why Hadria, who had all the day at her disposal, could not spend the night rationally. ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... chivalry. Woman- worship, 'the honour due to the weaker vessel,' is indeed of God, and woe to the nation and to the man in whom it dies. But in the Middle Age, this feeling had no religious root, by which it could connect itself rationally, either with actual wedlock or with the noble yearnings of men's spirits, and it therefore could not but die down into a semi-sensual dream of female-saint-worship, or fantastic idolatry of mere physical beauty, leaving the women ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... think lightly of baptism, but if it "became" the King of glory to be baptized in water to fulfill all righteousness, how can any one esteem it lightly, who has any regard for his soul? Since he himself is the way, can we rationally conclude that he would do anything for a guide to us that is unimportant? He had no sins to confess, it is true; but still he must be baptized to fulfill all righteousness. How important, then, must ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... which, I hoped, might be of some use to ascertain, how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted, which a Poet may rationally endeavour to impart. ...
— Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 1800, Vol. I. • William Wordsworth
... he shut his eyes for an instant to recover himself; and then he related at length his first apparent consciousness in Hyde Park, and all that had followed. Father Jervis put a question from time to time, which he answered quite rationally; and at the close the doctor, who was sitting opposite, watching every movement of his face, ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... suffer. And if he was a professional at living he would not do these things. There is no reason why he should do them, except the reason that he has never learnt his business, never studied the human machine as a whole, never really thought rationally about living. Supposing you encountered an automobilist who was swerving and grinding all over the road, and you stopped to ask what was the matter, and he replied: 'Never mind what's the matter. Just look at my lovely acetylene ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... Shotover. Has his faults, but upon my word, when you come to think of it, so have all of us. Very good-hearted, sensible fellow at bottom, Shotover. Always responds when you talk rationally to him. No nonsense about him."—His lordship sighed as he climbed the marble stair. "Great comfort to me at times Shotover. Shows very proper feeling on the present occasion, but naturally feels a diffidence about ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... secret of making a man. What would Columbus, or Washington and Franklin, or Webster and Clay, have accomplished had they proceeded on the principle of John Easy? No youth can rationally hope to attain to eminence in any thing who is not ready to "open the gate" for himself. And then, poor Mrs. Easy, how she did misjudge! Better for her son, had she dismissed her servants—or rather had she directed them to some more appropriate service, and let Master John ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... the point is consideration of the actual and possible outcome in cases of pathological lying by normal individuals. Here, as in other matters where bodily, mental, and social issues are blended, no prognosis or outlook can be rationally offered without consideration of possible changes in the circumstances peculiar to the given case. First and foremost stands out the fact that cure of the tendency sometimes happens even after long giving way to it. In this statement we are not ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... live hygienically is quite as difficult. Witness the speedy improvement of dissipated men when boarding with country friends who eat rationally and retire early. It must have been knowledge of this fact that prompted the tramways of Belfast to post conspicuous notices: "Spitting is a vile and filthy habit, and those who practice it subject themselves to the disgust and loathing ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... limited, but of greatest intensity. Since his Northfield romance, pain of years had crowded into a few brief months. The face of Esther Randolph is indelibly painted on his memory. Now free from haunting fear of detection, Oswald can more rationally review the events driving him into indefinite exile from home and friends. Doubtless Sir Donald and Esther believed him dead. They never could accuse him of murdering Alice Webster, but surely would charge this crime and his own death upon Paul Lanier. The lake tragedy was ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... seemed very well, more contented than most of the soldiers and talking more rationally and humanely than four fifths of those with whom I have conversed. The troops will probably be here a month or two at least, before any attempt is made in any direction. The commanding generals have quarreled,[106] and one has gone ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... fellow, that you write such a very good letter that I am ashamed to exhibit myself before my junior (which you are, after all) in the light of the dreary idiot I feel. Understand that there will be nothing funny in the following pages. If I can manage to be rationally coherent, I shall be ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... powers requisite to complete execution of its trust. And unless it can be shown that the circumstances which may affect the public safety are reducible within certain determinate limits; unless the contrary of this position can be fairly and rationally disputed, it must be admitted, as a necessary consequence, that there can be no limitation of that authority which is to provide for the defense and protection of the community, in any matter essential to its efficacy that is, in any ...
— The Federalist Papers
... chambers of the rifles. It was music to the ears of Danbury, who from the moment his feet had touched shore was impatient to take the road without further delay. Wilson was just as bad, if not worse, which left Stubbs really the only man of them all able to think calmly and somewhat rationally. ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... children; and reciprocal friendship grows in strength and in pleasure both for child and older friend, as the child grows older. When a child is permitted the freedom of his own individuality, he can show the best in himself. When he is tempted to go wrong, he can be rationally guided in the right way in such a manner that he will accept the guidance as an act of friendship; and to that friendship he will feel bound in honor to be true, because he knows that we, his friends, are obeying the same laws. Of course all this comes to him from no conscious ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call
... epoch. We turn from them with loathing. They inspire neither terror nor pity, only the sickness of the shambles. And yet it would be unjust to ascribe their unimaginative ghastliness to any special love of cruelty. This evil element may be rationally deduced from false dramatic instinct and perverted habits of brooding sensuously on our Lord's Passion, in minds deprived of the right feeling ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... been flooded with the light of the sages and heroes of antiquity,—can you not refrain from making the code of knightly honour—that is to say, the code of folly and brutality—the guiding principle of your conduct?—Examine it rationally once and for all, and reduce it to plain terms; lay its pitiable narrowness bare, and let it be the touchstone, not of your hearts but of your minds. If you do not regret it then, it will merely show that your head is not fitted for work in a sphere where great gifts of discrimination are needful ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... some cocoa-nut milk and a little fish, which he took very readily; and after eating some of the solid food he appeared much better, and was soon able to sit up and talk rationally. ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston
... offering itself to the life of youth. It was a momentous transition, undertaken with the profoundest sense of its seriousness and significance. It was an act of faith,—of faith in religion and of faith in young men. The University announced the belief that religion, rationally presented, will always have for healthy-minded young men a commanding interest. This faith has been abundantly justified. There has become familiar among us, through the devotion of successive staffs of Preachers, a clearer sense of the simplicity ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... that had been thrown away—quite good except for one leg,—and Uncle William sat in it with his face away from the sea. He seemed much shaken and looked gray and tired, but he talked quite quietly and rationally about our going to America, and how we must all work, because work is man's lot. He himself, he says, will take up the presidency of Harvard University in New York, and Uncle Henry, who, of course, was our own Grand Admiral and is a sailor, will enter as Admiral of the ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... us endeavor to unravel the whole passage. First he states, that, in May, 1782, he had forgotten his motives for falsifying the Company's accounts; but he affirms the facts contained in the report, and afterwards, very rationally, draws such inferences as necessarily or with a strong probability follow them. And if I understand it at all, which God knows I no more pretend to do than Don Quixote did those sentences of lovers in romance-writers of which ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... education, for it. "If I had been taught to think," she said, "when my memory was being burdened with historical anecdotes torn from the text, and other useless scraps of knowledge, I should be able to see both sides of a subject, and judge rationally, now. As it is, I never see more than one side at a time, and when I have mastered that, I feel like the old judge in some Greek play, who, when he had heard one party to a suit, begged that the other would not speak as it would only poggle what was ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... ever vouchsafed to me by social indorsement from somebody else. We are perpetually blaming our heads of Government Bureaus for their poor knowledge of character,—their subordinates, we say, are never pegs in the right holes. If we understood our civilized system of introductions, we could not rationally expect anything else. The great mass of polite mankind are trained not to know character, but to take somebody else's voucher for it. Their acquaintances, most of their friendships, come to them through ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... imprisonment, my door was guarded by no less than four. My vanity also might have been flattered: I might hence conclude how high was the value set upon my head, since all this trouble was taken to hold me in security. Certain it is that in my chains I thought more rationally, more nobly, reasoned more philosophically on man, his nature, his zeal, his imaginary wants, the effects of his ambition, his passions, and saw more distinctly his dream of earthly good, than those who had imprisoned, or those who ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 2 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... explanation of the origin of species. Either all the species of plants and animals must have been supernaturally created, or else they must have been naturally evolved. There is no third hypothesis possible; for no one can rationally suggest that species ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... are quite right. I did not think of it because I was quite past thinking rationally. I was just clean mad. Come in the house and I will tell you all ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... me," the young man none the less rationally asked, "the chance to be? A brute of a humbug ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... plays of Shakespeare in which alone a reverent and reasonable critic might perhaps find something rationally and really exceptionable have also this far other quality in common, that in them as in his topmost tragedies of the same period either the exaltation of his eloquence touches the very highest point of expressible poetry, or his power of speculation alternately ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... had not been unjust, when he should have continued to direct all his attention to its internal affairs. Had he been at the head of any other than a Spanish ministry, Alberoni would probably have borne himself rationally; but there is something in the politics of Spain that affects even the wisest of heads, often turning them, as it were, and rendering their owners the strangest of caricatures. It is sometimes said that the most Irish of the people ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... was the more inexcusable in view of the fact that, thanks to the example of Blount, Sevier, and Robertson, the Tennesseeans, alone among the frontiersmen, showed an intelligent appreciation of the benefits of the Union and a readiness to render it loyal support. The Kentuckians acted far less rationally; yet the Government tolerated much misconduct on their part, and largely for their benefit carried on a great national war against the Northwestern Indians. In the Southwest almost all that the Administration did was ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... constantly employed. Few are so miserable as those who have nothing to do, or who, unable to find employment, feel a dull vacuum in their time. And the converse of this proposition is equally true, that the time of those flies pleasantly away, who can employ it rationally. But there is rarely such a being among the Quakers as a lazy person, gaping about for amusement. Their trades or callings occupy the greater portion of their time. Their meetings of discipline, as has been already shewn, occupy their time again. The execution of the various offices ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... have some lunch first,' Hilda rejoined with practical common-sense, 'and then talk it over rationally afterwards, instead of wringing our hands helplessly like a pair of Frenchmen in a street difficulty.' (Hilda had a fine old crusted English contempt, by the way, for those vastly inferior and foolish creatures known ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... expect refreshments, so we had not to apologize for having nothing to set before them. They had not come, however, for meat and drink, but for talk. And talk we did, sometimes altogether, sometimes rationally; but I doubt whether any of us had ever enjoyed talking so ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... of that mysterious entity which some people find it possible to believe in which is {37} neither mind nor matter. Let us suppose literally nobody and nothing to have existed. Now could you under these conditions rationally suppose that anything could have come into existence? Could you for one moment admit the possibility that after countless aeons of nothingness a flash of lightning should occur or an animal be born? Surely, on reflection ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... did; but was no man of judgement in his business, but hath been out in the greatest points that have come before them. And then in the business of fore-castles, which he did oppose, all the world sees now the use of them for shelter of men. He did talk very rationally to me, insomuch that I took more pleasure this night in hearing him discourse, than I ever did in my life in any thing that he said. He gone I to the office again, and so after some business home to supper ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... started so many possible objections would try to show us that what they so much deprecate is probable.... Because power may be abused, shall we be reduced to anarchy? What hinders our state legislatures from abusing their powers?... May we not rationally suppose that the persons we shall choose to administer the government will be, in general, good men?" General Thompson said he was surprised to hear such an argument from a clergyman, who was professionally bound ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... for the present," he said. "You should put some ice on his head, and if he recovers consciousness, so as to speak before I come back, observe what he says. He may be in a delirium, or he may talk quite rationally. One cannot tell Send for this medicine and give it to him if he is conscious. Otherwise, only keep his head cool. I will come back early in the evening. You are not hurt yourself?" he ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... reasons urged for it are weak and rather frivolous. It is easy to understand that a man who has reached the place in medicine where he can recommend manipulative treatments of this kind, and discuss nutritional modes so rationally, knew his practical medicine well, and wrote ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... knowledge is sound and useful, because it comes from long experience. He and his forefathers, perhaps for a thousand years and more, have been farming this country, reading Madam How's books with very keen eyes, experimenting and watching, very carefully and rationally; making mistakes often, and failing and losing their crops and their money; but learning from their mistakes, till their empiric knowledge, as it is called, helps them to grow sometimes quite as good crops as if they had learned ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... not very improbable, from their proposing to send ten sixteenths of the whole investment in silk,—which, as will be seen hereafter, the Company has prohibited to be sent on their account, as a disadvantageous article. Nothing but the servants being overloaded can rationally account for their choice of so great a proportion of so ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... origin of the stories themselves. This, though a question of apparently inexhaustible attraction to some people, must not occupy us very long here. It shall be enough to say that many of these subjects are hardy perennials which meet us in all literatures, and the existence of which is more rationally to be accounted for by the supposition of a certain common form of story, resulting partly from the conditions of human life and character, partly from the conformation of the human intellect, than by supposing deliberate transmission and copying from one nation to another. For this latter ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... still staring, unable to speak. Mary, desirous that Mr. Crusoe should not misunderstand their flight, explained the affair to Mr. Hunter, a little more rationally ...
— Virginia of Elk Creek Valley • Mary Ellen Chase
... plump, red-cheeked miss sat beside me. O'Ganlon was entertained by the talkative daughter, who drove him quite mad; so that, when we resumed our horses, he insisted upon a second "healthy dash," and disappeared through a strip of woods. I followed, rationally, and had come to a blacksmith's shop, at the corner of a diverging road, when I was made aware of some startling occurrence in my rear. A mounted officer dashed past me, shouting some unintelligible tidings, and he was followed in quick succession by a dozen cavalry-men, ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... need-fire was kindled as a remedy for cattle-disease as late as 1826. "A wealthy old farmer, having lost several of his cattle by some disease very prevalent at present, and being able to account for it in no way so rationally as by witchcraft, had recourse to the following remedy, recommended to him by a weird sister in his neighbourhood, as an effectual protection from the attacks of the foul fiend. A few stones were piled together in the barnyard, ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... any of my friends the disagreeables which the performance of my works, with the widespread presuppositions and prejudices against them, brings with it. In a few years I hope things will go better, more rationally, and more ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... grand way, is a doctrine of evolution—rationally proclaims its heaven but a higher stage of development through pain, and teaches that even in paradise the cessation of effort produces degradation. With equal reasonableness it declares that the capacity for pain in the superhuman world increases always in proportion to ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... offer them in this emergency. I was over Saint Luke's the other day with my friend Tuthill, and mightily pleased with one of his contrivances for the comfort and amelioration of the students. They have double cells, in which a pair may lie feet to feet horizontally, and chat the time away as rationally as they can. It must certainly be more sociable for them these warm raving nights. The right-hand truckle in one of these friendly recesses, at present vacant, was preparing, I understood, for Mr. Irving. Poor fellow! it is time he removed from Pentonville. I followed ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... to Cassius the occurrence which he had witnessed. Cassius, though very sensitive, it seems, to the influence of omens affecting himself, was quite philosophical in his views in respect to those of other men. He argued very rationally with Brutus to convince him that the vision which he had seen was only a phantom of sleep, taking its form and character from the ideas and images which the situation in which Brutus was then placed, and the fatigue and anxiety which he had endured, ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... territory, with the multiplication of interests, with the varieties, increasing from time to time, of the products of this great country, the bonds which bind the Union together should have increased. Rationally considered, they have increased, because the free trade which was established in the beginning has now become more valuable to the people of the United States than their trade with all the rest of ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... in no condition to be dealt with rationally," continued Mrs. Greyson, in a tone explanatory, but in no way defensive, "so I ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... rather hard for the miscarriage of his "improvements." "I know," says he, "when and where you undertook for a small charge to make a river navigable, and it has cost the proprietors about six times as much, and is not yet effective; nor can any man rationally predict when it will be. I know since you left it your son undertook it, and this winter shamefully left his undertaking." Yarranton's friends immediately replied in a four-page folio, entitled 'England's Improvements Justified; and the Author thereof, Captain Y., vindicated ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... follies. A later volume of "Little Tales" is, indeed, so little as scarcely to have any excuse for being. The stories have all more or less of a marine flavor; but the only one of them that has a sufficient motif, rationally developed, is one entitled "How the Pilot Got his Music-box." The novel, "A Supernumerary," is also a rather weak performance, badly constructed, and ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... Captain Huntly. Here we are, already more than ten degrees south of the point from which we started, and yet still we are per- sistently following a southeasterly course! I cannot bring myself to the conclusion that the man is mad. I have had various conversations with him: he has always spoken rationally and sensibly. He shows no tokens of insanity. Perhaps his case is one of those in which insanity is partial, and where the mania is of a character which extends only to the matters connected with his profession. Yet ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... know better. In Norway, however, I am willing to believe that the stultification has in most cases been unintentional; and the reason is not far to seek. In that country a great many of the critics are theologians, more or less disguised; and these gentlemen are, as a rule, quite unable to write rationally about creative literature. That enfeeblement of judgment which, at least in the case of the average man, is an inevitable consequence of prolonged occupation with theological studies, betrays itself more especially ...
— Ghosts • Henrik Ibsen
... went, everything fitted in finally and rationally enough. Valentin had learned by his inquiries that morning that a Father Brown from Essex was bringing up a silver cross with sapphires, a relic of considerable value, to show some of the foreign priests at the congress. This undoubtedly ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... will be done. I've had a deal of hard work in my life, and I've been badgered and bullied so much by your strait-laced professors, that I'm glad to get away from the world for a spell, and talk and do rationally, without being ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... the present, entirely on his credibility. I must be convinced in the first place that he was not deceived himself, and secondly, that he has no motive in deceiving me. And evidence equally conclusive must accompany the truth of divine revelation, or it ought not, nay more, it cannot, rationally be believed. But supposing that I am convinced of the truth, and therefore believe; and I relate the same to a third person; is it equally revelation to him as it was to me? Yes, it may be so considered, in one sense, at ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... repugnance, and this, perhaps, from the mere sound of the phrase in his ear; from which it appears that all things of human reason unite and center in this, that God is one. There are two reasons for this. First, the very capacity to think rationally, viewed in itself, is not man's, but is God's in man; upon this capacity human reason in its general nature depends, and this general nature of reason causes man to see as from himself that God is one. Secondly, by means of that capacity man either is in the light ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... questions which beset the human mind today. All Italian Fascists should read your discourse and derive from it both the clear formulation of the basic principles of our program as well as the reasons why Fascism must be systematically, firmly, and rationally inflexible in its uncompromising attitude towards other parties. Thus and only thus can the word become flesh and the ideas be ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... communicated it to my dear, my unhappy Berenice. You saw the struggle of Masinissa, when you forced him to give up his beloved Sophonisba. Mine was a harder conflict. She had abandoned him to marry the King of Numidia. He knew that her ruling passion was ambition, not love. He could not rationally esteem her when she quitted a husband whom she had ruined, who had lost his crown and his liberty in the cause of her country and for her sake, to give her person to him, the capital foe of that unfortunate ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... an income for? Obviously to keep him alive. Since it is evident that the first condition on which he can be kept alive without enslaving somebody else is that he shall produce an equivalent for what it costs to keep him alive, we may quite rationally compel him to abstain from idling by whatever means we employ to compel him to abstain from murder, arson, forgery, or any other crime. The one supremely foolish thing to do with him is to do nothing; ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... truly and rationally, Aspasia, and in an earlier age you would have sat upon the Pythoness's tripod and prophesied. Like the priestess, you know not perhaps what you say, but a god ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... man who has actually achieved goodness, and tries to make a science and art of goodness, to find a way in which it can be clearly known and rationally and effectively taught. "Can virtue be taught?" is his characteristic question. The chief result of his keen scrutiny is to bring to light how little men really know of the higher life,—how little he knows of it himself. The effect of this revelation of ignorance is not a despair of ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... be told, was hardly as affected by the parting as his poor mother. Not that he was not sorry to leave home, or that he did not love her he left behind; but with all the world before him, he was at present far too excited to think of anything rationally. Besides, that last remark about the flannel vests had greatly disturbed him. The carriage was full of people, who must have heard it, and would be sure to set him down as no end of a ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... argued with him vainly by the hour together. He possesses, unfortunately, an acute nervous sensibility and a vivid imagination; and besides, he has, as I suspect, been superstitiously brought up as a child. It would be probably useless to argue rationally with him on certain spiritual subjects, even if his mind was in perfect health. He has a good deal of the mystic and the dreamer in his composition; and science and logic are but broken reeds to depend upon with men of ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... produce voluntary motion and modify all the processes of life, that we feel as if we had sensation and volition in every part of the body; or, in other words, that our conscious existence was in the body; but we rationally know that the sensation and volition occur in the brain, for neither sensation nor voluntary motion can occur if the nervous connection with the brain is interrupted by compression and section, or if the brain itself be sufficiently ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, April 1887 - Volume 1, Number 3 • Various
... Creed. Beautifully printed in two colors in Old English Text and giving the seven articles of belief of the true vitosophist, expressing rationally his belief in and relation to the subjects of God, Life Eternal, Death, Immortality, Evil and Good, the forces of Nature, the practice of the Virtues and the attainment of Happiness. This is a work of Art and is worthy of a place of honor ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor |
